I was on the train, when a heavily laden Japanese couple got on. They were rather attractive and cool-looking despite – perhaps even because of – the man’s long pony-tail (which makes me wonder, in passing about the way the semiotic value of hairstyles varies among different ethnocultural groups, e.g. the different meanings associated with a mohican sported by, respectively, a punk and an actual Mohican. Obviously, almost any caucasian male with a pony-tale becomes a figure of fun, but this Japanese guy somehow made it work). They sat down, and both took out a jazz magazine. One of the jazz magazines was simply, and unimaginatively titled Jazz Magazine. I didn’t catch what the other was called. The woman was wearing a long grey woollen dress, over some thick grey woollen tights, a look she rocked (or jazzed, perhaps). He was wearing a sharp suit. They were a striking pair, and I felt a strong urge to engage them in discourse. I suppose I wanted to show our visitors (and visitors they clearly were, based on the heavy luggage, and the fact they chatted in actual Japanese) that not all Britons hate the rest of the world, that sort of thing, even though, personally, I don’t really like abroad, or anywhere that isn’t on the Jubilee line or in Yorkshire. I was considering asking them if they were over here to take in the jazz venues. I tried to think of some, but jazz isn’t really my thing. Ronnie Corbett’s? Didn’t sound quite right. The Jazz Cafe? Too obvious, surely – that ‘Jazz’ had to be ironic, and it was really a heavy metal venue. However before I had the chance to start conversing, I was overtaken by one of my titanic, hay-fever induced sneezing fits. One, two, three, four, a pause, wait for it, five six, seven. Luckily I had my hanky handy. When I finished I looked up, expecting a smile from the Japanese couple. The woman was rummaging in her bag. Perhaps looking for a tissue, I thought. She pulled out one of those anti-pollution masks, and strapped it to her face, resolutely refusing eye contact. I wanted to explain that it was only hay-fever, and not swine flu. ‘Look,’ I wanted to say, waving my cleanish, unslimed hanky in front of her. ‘Air, it was just air…’ But it was my stop, and I had to gather my things and jump off.

There’s a woman in our street I often see going to school with two small children. She’s very attractive, but careworn and always a little sad. Mrs McG told me a while ago that her husband had left her. Because of that, I developed a special face for her, one of my best, I think. The face was intended to convey many things: sympathy and understanding for her terrible situation; admiration for her fortitude; a benign tenderness towards her two, very cute, children. And then, on a deeper level, a certain despair at the awfulness of men, and an acceptance that as one of them, I had to take some responsibility for that awfulness.I unleash this face each time we pass in the street and, as you can imagine, it takes a lot out of me, and I often take several minutes to fully get over it. There are times when we see each other approaching from the full length of the street, and then the effort of keeping the face in order will leave my frown muscles aching for the rest of the day. She always smiles back, and it’s a smile that almost matches my own expression in complexity, conveying on her part a determination to carry on, to take out of each day what it could offer, to never give in or submit. And also an acknowledgement that I had understood her sufferings, and was on her side in my own weak and ineffectual way. And perhaps an appreciation of the fact that wearing my pyjamas under my clothes and having mad morning hair means that I’m probably some kind of artist or creative type, maybe a poet, or composer of modernist ballets. Anyway, Monty and I were walking Mrs McG to the tube this morning when we encountered the woman, leaving her flat. I only had time to arrange a quick and peremptory version of the face, and she, in turn, smiled a quick smile. ‘So sad,’ I said, to Mrs McG.‘What?’‘You know, that shit of a husband… Leaving the children. So small…’‘What are you on about?’‘That lady… husband.. you said he left in the night…?’‘That’s not her.’‘Eh?’‘That was another woman. Another man. This one is very happily married, insofar as anyone is.’‘Oh.’All those faces, wasted. And what must she have thought? I suppose the only way to get anything out of this is to find another abandoned wife (or husband), and point the face at them.

I arrived for my events in Durham only mildly troubled, but things soon spiralled down. (The mild troubles related to getting no sleep last night, plus an unfortunate incident in the station. I was walking along whistling ‘I got you under my skin’, as I’ve been reading the huge two volume Kaplan biography of Sinatra, when the person in front of me – a middle-aged woman – span around and gave me an evil glare. I didn’t know why, but wondered if it was because she thought I was in some way whistling it at or for her, in some sort of predatory way. Or maybe she was just looking behind her at someone else, and she has the sort of face that falls easily into a glare. Either way, I’ll never know, but it cast a shadow over my journey.
Then I decided to walk the 50 minutes to my Premier Inn, to save the taxi fare. Which was fine, if you’ve a fondness for strolling by dual carriageways. I eventually reached a part of Durham called, I kid you not, Pity Me – I took a photo of the sign. I vaguely wanted to joke with someone about this, but the only people around were a group of tough primary kids smoking at the bus stop, and I feared that hearing my non-local accent might trigger some primal rage or Carthaginian barbarity, so I hurried on.
I finally reached my destination, dumped my bags and went shopping at the adjacent retail park. However, although I could clearly see it, I couldn’t work out how to get in it. I wandered around by another couple of dual carriageways without getting any closer. In the end I tried to enter through a Honda car place. There was a low fence at the back I thought I could scramble over. But some young salesman saw and cornered me. I panicked and expressed an interest in buying a car.
“Which one?”
Until the 1990s I knew every car on British roads, but my car lore is long gone. I glanced at a smallish vehicle with a puckered sort of sneer on its face, like a mocking orc. The name came back to me. Honda something… Honda Crevice? No…
“How much is the Honda Cervix?”
“The what?”
“Civic,” I barked “CIVIC!”
He started talking about a test drive. He went to get the keys and I ran away and hid behind some bins.
Later I stumbled somehow into the retail park. I went to Superdrug, as I’d come away without any toiletries. There were various irresistible special offers that meant I went to the till with three packets of dental floss, two toothpaste tubes and more antiperspirant than even I could get through in a day of school events. Oh, and some haribo tangfastics. The woman on the till looked at me with pity. No, better to call it sympathy. What sort of a life must this person live, you could see her asking herself. She had a kind face. I was worried that she might think I had horrible brown teeth, hence my need for so much floss etc. So I tried to smile, but I was having a low blood sugar episode by now and I think it was more of a carnivorous leer. She asked if I had a Superdrug card thing and when I said no she said I should get one, as I could start to save straight away, and even though didn’t want one at all I said OK.
Then I thought I’d get some sushi from Marks , but they didn’t have any. After a period of listless wandering, I looked in my basket, and all I had was some plums and a three pack of underpants, like some kind of art installation. I put the basket down and tried to find my way back to the hotel. But it was even harder to leave the retail park than to enter it. In the end I tried to cut through some sparse birch woodland, with a Blair Witch sort of feel. I thought I sensed other lost souls amid the trees, and worried that it might be a gay pickup area, and I’d be forced to give an unsatisfactory blowjob to a trucker from Gateshead in exchange for directions out of there, but it was fine, and I crawled under some barbed wire to get back to a familiar stretch of dual carriageway, a mere mile or two from the hotel.
Anyway, a night of editing my philosophy book ahead of me, so I can’t get drunk. I like Durham, though. I feel very much at home, here.

‘What?’‘Eh?’‘You were mumbling something.’‘I wasn’t.’‘You were. Not just mumbling. It sounded like a…’‘Like a what?’‘A speech.’‘A speech?’‘Yes, a speech.’‘What sort of speech?’‘An acceptance speech of some kind, I think. Like an award …’‘Oh.’‘What were you accepting?’‘Nothing.’‘No, you were, go on.’‘OK. Fine. It was Fireman of the Year.’‘Fireman of the Year? But you’re not a fireman. And you’re frightened of fire. You put the oven gloves on when you light a candle.’ ‘Yeah, I know.’‘Plus, you do realise they’re called firefighters, now.’‘Yeah. Sorry.’‘So what did you get the award for?’‘It’s complicated…’‘Go on.’‘You know that white Rasta bloke who I always thought stole my bike, and who hangs around the cafes all day?’‘Yeah.’‘Well it turns out he’s a fire … fighter.’ ‘How do you know?’‘I saw him coming off his shift. So, anyway, I felt guilty about stereotyping him as a bike thief just because he was a white Rasta, so I had this daydream in which I became a firefighter to make up for it, and then I rescued some tramps from the public toilet on the green–’‘Huh?’‘It had been set on fire by hooligans. There was a store of highly combustible toilet rolls, and it all got out of hand. There were vagrants sleeping in there, and I rescued them. Fireman’s lift, mouth to mouth, the works.’‘I see. And that’s why you got the award?’‘Yep.’‘What did you say in your speech?’‘It was mainly score settling. People who said I’d never make it in the firefighting world. Plus a random attack on some people from publishing who have annoyed me by being more successful, or by thinking I’m an arsehole.’‘How did it go down.’‘You interrupted me, so we’ll never know.’

Interesting, these new anxieties we have now, that were unthought of in the olden days. For example the anxiety about whether not your package will fit into the large letter slot at the post office, or if it will have to go as a small parcel, incurring an extra charge. Anyway, I took four packages, all situated in that anxiety-inducing no-man’s land, to the Post Office. It’s my nearest branch, rather than the one in the converted church that doubles as a cafe, creche and abattoir. This branch is run by a pair of bald, stout brothers, efficient and reasonably friendly, but a little pompous. You get the impression they think they were intended for slightly better things, and they’re probably right. So the first three packages just make it through the large letter slot, although I can’t help but inhale helpfully as they do so. The final one is larger, but softer. It gets about half way through. The brother looks at me, sadly.‘Can’t you, er, squidge it,’ I say. So it gets through the …’ I’m going to say slot, but this now suddenly strikes me as faintly obscene. Not the sort of thing to say in front of this dignified couple. I fish for an alternative. There’s nothing there. Cavity? Worse. Cleft? Insane. I feel the sudden irresistible pull of ‘vagina’. Yes, I’m going to cry out in the post office for this dignified plump, middle aged man to cram the package into the vagina. But, no, it’s OK. ‘Orifice!’ I say, beaming. The man nods, pleased, I think that he’s found himself running the sort of post office where his customers use words like orifice. He squidges the package, and it slides through. All is well.

My trip to the Post Office yesterday was particularly dense with incident. I had to send some trainers back to Hi-Tec because they’d developed an unusual fault. (They were the emergency trainers I bought after I gave away a pair of shoes to a slumbering tramp in Camden.) Cycling along, I was surprised to hear Who Are You? by the who come on my iPod. I don’t have any strong views on The Who, either pro or anti, but I’ve never owned any of their records. How was it here? Perhaps it was on a soundtrack album I’d bought … But of course I knew the song. I pulled up at the traffic lights, and a woman with her toddler walked in front of me. They were Korean or Japanese, and in the way if these things the child was extraordinarily cute, and it was impossible not to smile at her as she skipped by. The mother smiled back. Just then the chorus came on: Who are you?Who, who, who, who?Who are you?Who, who, who, who? And without thinking, I found myself singing along, not loudly, but audibly.Who are you?Who, who, who, who?Who are you?Who, who, who, who?And I suppose it must have looked exactly as if I was singing it at the couple in front of me. Singing it in a racist way. Challenging their identity, and their right to be here. In my recollection the woman looked shocked and the child began to cry, but I think that’s just my masochistic delight in self torment. I wanted to explain to them that I’m not a racist, and that I don’t even like the Who. I could have pointed out that there’s an attractive Korean character in my book Leopard Adventure.
But it was hopeless, and the lights had changed.

Ten years ago I started writing a YA novel. I wrote a couple of pages on the first day. Then I wrote no more. No idea why. I suspect that I just jot distracted, and then forgot about it. It was called, or going to be called, An A-Zed of Richard’s Head. The idea was to write a novel in the form of an encyclopaedia, each chapter being a different entry. Anyway, ten years on, I stumbled across it, while clearing the crud out of my hard drive, I’ll never write the novel. But here it is, for anyone who wants to see what a dead end looks like.

A is for Aardvark

Why?

Because A is always for Aardvark, and here I am beginning at the beginning, getting everything down while there is still time.

A shuffling, snuffling grubber in antheaps and shitheaps. A lurking night creature. Pigsnouted, bat-eared. Beautiful not at all. Find beauty and then look in the exact opposite direction. If beauty is up, look down. If it is east, look west. There you will find aardvark. Earth pig it means. An ugly word in an ugly tongue. Nocturnal and solitary. They have no living relatives, no living friends. They run away zigzag style when chased, and if cornered will lash out feebly with claws and tail. But their main defence is digging; their chief hope to be ignored.

So here, at the outset, is Richard Head, the human aardvark. His goal (my goal, because he’s me), was to get through each day without being laughed at. Mockery was his leopard, stalking him remorselessly though the bush.

But, like the aardvark, Richard was good at one thing: knowing. Knowing was to Richard what digging is to the aardvark. His thing. His metier. Richard knows everything. Well, not everything. Only the stuff that doesn’t matter. He knows all the animals there are. He knows all the history there was. What he doesn’t know is how to make himself less of a joke.

An example. From school, of course. Back in Year 9. Rainy day PE. Usually that was good. It meant they didn’t have to go running across the fields being screamed at by the mentally unstable PE teacher, Mr Fricker. Indoor games meant sitting on the benches at one end of the gym listening to Fricker tell them about personal hygiene, whilst at the other end of the gym Mrs Hennegan advised the girls against teenage pregnancy and Chlamydia and vaginal warts, as if someone else had been telling them what a good idea they were. There was supposed to be a slide show to go with the Chlamydia and the warts, but there was no chance of that being shown in the gym, lest the boys see it and get all frothed up. If Mrs Hennegan was a horse you’d probably say she looked a lot like a human, but for a human she looked an awful lot like a horse.

Mr Fricker, on the other hand, looked like a naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber) which is to say, and no offence is intended here (to penises or naked mole rats), that he looked a lot like a penis. That featureless domed head, the curious, fleshy wattle around his neck – you get the picture.

But that’s what normally would have been happening on an indoor gym day. On this day Mrs Hennegan wasn’t around for the Chlamydia chat and Mr Fricker was off having his head waxed, or his shaft buffed or some suchlike, so the class was in the less than capable hands of two junior members of staff who had the misfortune to be hanging around in the staffroom when the Deputy Head was prowling. First there was Mr Fung who’d been brought in to the school on some crazy whim to teach Mandarin. His Mandarin may have been great, but his English sucked. The other was Miss Kelly. Miss Kelly was looked like one of us, a teenager I mean, and she was as pretty as magnolia flowers before they go brown and rot.

This morning I decided to make some North Staffordshire oat cakes – a sort of oaty pancake, popular in … well, you do the math. This involved simultaneous pouring and stirring – always a challenge – so I asked Mrs McG to help me out. Being already arrayed in her finery, she did it at arm’s length, to avoid splashes. Seeing I was wearing one of my new jumpers, she said, ‘You should wear an apron’. ‘Ah, I said, no need, as I’m wearing my oatmeal jumper, exactly the same hue as the oatcake mixture. So the er, stains won’t be, ah, visible.’ She looked thoughtful for a moment or two. ‘Did you wear the jumper because you were making oatcakes, or did you make the oatcakes because you were wearing the jumper?’ It’s one of the great philosophical questions, and I’ve been pondering it ever since. I was stumped. I tried to retrace the steps of my reasoning, but things became muddled and confused. I was sure that one of the explanations was correct, but I was stuck, like the starving donkey, in between two equidistant carrots.

Walking with Monty this morning I spotted a slumped form amid the rubbish left out for the bin men. I thought at first that it was a corpse, but then realised it was a broken case for a double bass.
I’ve always thought carrying around a double bass was an easy way to appear interesting. You assume that the double bass player has a rich and creatively rewarding life, spending his (or her) days working in an orchestra – generally in that supportive role, supplying the gravy in the orchestral meat pie, that dark, earthy, binding substrate without which the music has no substance, no bottom.
And you occasionally get to star, playing the double bass suite by Eduardo de Poncey, or Ballinsky’s concerto for double bass and zither.
And then in the evenings you don the polo neck and play in a jazz band. And no one minds that you’re on the tubby side – that’s expected from double bass players.
Who wouldn’t want that life?
Even better, who wouldn’t want other people to think you had that life? People would assume you to be sensitive, yet humorous. Manly, as well (if you were a man), from schlepping the beast around all day.
So, I thought briefly about taking the case home. I imagined myself travelling around with it. On the tube. On buses. Just walking down the street. The smiles of the other passengers. Admiring looks from beautiful women. And because the case would be empty, it would be relatively easy to carry, and wouldn’t aggravate my bad back.
But then the realities came home. Where would I store it? How could I explain it to Mrs McG? ‘Oh, it’s a very practical way to carry my laptop around…”
No, it was all just a pipe dream. Monty had a quick sniff and would have peed on the case if I hadn’t yanked him away.

You get used to disappointment in life, and come to expect it. It’s a protection, I suppose. If you except disappointment, then it’s not really disappointing. It loses its sting-a-ling-a-ling. But then there are certain things which you come to count on. Still points in the turning world. Your bankers. The things you know will bring you satisfaction and pleasure, when everything else has turned to crap. Or at the very least sources of consolation on a cold day. So after a boring hour getting injected for my allergies I went to a well-regarded fast-food establishment in King’s Cross, and ordered a portion of chips and curry sauce. I’ve spoken about this delicacy before: it’s literally my favourite food, no irony, no joking. It’s the perfect combination of East and West, the ultimate fusion. Something happens when the curry sauce co-mingles with the chips: both elements are transformed, becoming better than themselves. It’s like the improbable friendship between Gimli and Legolas. And if this is what cultural appropriation tastes of, then I’m all for it. And the beauty of curry and chips is that it’s nearly always the same, because they all use the same pre-made curry mix. So there’s that comfort element to it.
So I ordered my chips and curry sauce, and it began well. The chips looked fine: properly carved from a living potato, and thick as a workman’s thumb. And then it all began to go wrong. Rather than ladle the curry sauce from a bubbling cauldron, as usually happens, the friendly young guy bent below the counter and produced a large plastic drum, marked ‘Chinese curry sauce concentrate’. It bore a cartoon of a smiling Chinese man, wielding a cleaver. My fellow then spooned some of the concentrate into a jug, using a dismayingly short spoon, that must have involved some hand contact with the curry stuff. He then filled the jug with hot water from the coffee machine. He stirred it with the same short spoon.
‘Is this thick enough?’ he asked me. I had no idea. You don’t normally get asked these things. It’s like being asked by the surgeon if you think he’s cut all the gangrene away.
I nodded, and then he poured it over my chips, which I’d already salt-and-vinegared. I could tell it was all wrong. It was too thick. It was grainy and horrible. And I’d seen him make it, his thumb in the concentrate.
Anyway, I took it to a desolate park and sat in the drizzle, with some skiving schoolkids occasionally shouting threats at me. I ate the chips and curry sauce. It’s my way. They were horrible.
Afterwards I sat in the British Library, exuding a dank aroma of curry and defeat. Every half hour or so a gas bubble would fight its way up, and a librarian across the room would surreptitiously check the sole of her shoe for dogshit.